Everything had cleared itself up, fallen into perspective, assumed a new and saner proportion, ever since the chill summer dawn when he had risen from his bed of leaves with the knowledge that his old life was over. With one bound he had leapt clear of the tradition of his class and type, which was to see molehills as mountains and mountains themselves as a mere menacing blur on the horizon: and now, even the mountains had come closer and revealed that easy and well-trodden paths led to their heights; even, it seemed, to their glittering snow-crowned summits. Decisions had to be taken at once, because he had no reserve of money and therefore none of time. So he took them quickly. Five minutes’ reflection had led him to the choice of a relative from whom he should borrow the money, and to the resolve to make it the smallest sum he could possibly manage with. As it was, he had found that a good ladder was too expensive, and was managing with an old one with several rungs missing, whose journey to the scrap-heap or the bonfire he had halted until, in a week or two, he could afford a new one. It was the same with his ‘hand-cart’; the five pounds would never have run to a good one, and he had found a rag-and-bone man willing to sell him the ruins of an old pram—it had no coachwork, just the frame and wheels—for five shillings. Only his pail and his various cloths were of the finest quality that money could buy. He may have shed all other middle-class attributes, but the ideal of fine quality, of a good job well done (always a bourgeois rather than working-class ideal) had accompanied him into the new world.

Again, the choice of a town to live in had been an easy one. It must be a place where he had no relatives; it must not be too small, or there would not be enough business; nor too large, for he disliked the city atmosphere; and perhaps it would be as well to choose a place where he might start with some advantage, or possibility of advantage. Where did he know of any large institu­tion which might see fit to give him a contract? (That was his magic word, for the remarks of the red-faced man in the pub constituted his whole professional training.) At first he toyed with the idea of going back to his university town, and trying to get a contract from his college; but he immediately reflected, not only that they would be unlikely to give him one, but also that he could never, now he came to think of it, remember having seen a professional window-cleaner at work in a college. Probably the authorities preferred, with characteristic narrowness, to include window-cleaning among the duties of the college servants. Where else?